Facebook Messenger Finally Bridges the Great Emoji Divide

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Facebook Messenger Finally Bridges the Great Emoji Divide

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Like many couples, my wife and I sometimes use emoji instead of fully formed sentences when we text. Mostly, it’s a time-saver; when you’re already wrangling two toddlers, the last thing you want is to wrangle autocorrect as well.

We have a problem, though, that’s about as first-world as it gets. She has an iPhone, and I’m on Android. This means that instead of complete messages, I’ll often get blank squares where my emoji library is incomplete. Worse, I’ll send an emoji of what looks like a smiley face on my phone that shows up as a grimace on hers. Communication is vital to any healthy marriage—so it’s unfortunate that our phones speak different languages.

This week, Facebook Messenger took matters into its own chat, releasing 1,500 new emoji that are not only diverse in skin tone and gender, they’re also consistent across whatever platform you use. It’s an important reminder that while cross-platform emoji harmony will likely never happen, it never really has to, just so long as everything makes sense within the same app.

The Grinning Face Between

The Great Emoji Divide has existed for as long as different platforms have offered emoji. The root problem is that the emoji governing body (yes, there is one), Unicode, can only provide rough guidelines of how any given emoji should look. The exact interpretation of “Alien Monster” or “European Castle” is up to each emoji-offering company, as is which emoji they even decide to offer. Android, iOS, Twitter, Samsung, LG, Windows; the same emoji often looks wildly different across them all.

Optimally, we'd have just one system of emoji across all platforms and it would be uniform.

Visual language professor Neil Cohn

The result, as you might imagine, is a mess. In fact, you don’t even need to imagine it; Unicode provides a handy chart of how all of the above, and a few more, interpret well over a thousand emoji in different ways. It can also lead to more than just the occasional annoyance. There’s constant danger of being misunderstood, without even realizing it.

“Perhaps a rough analogy would be that it’s like having a thesaurus filter your words,” says Neil Cohn, a professor of visual language. “I choose one word, and the platform then chooses a different but related word to express to you instead. Maybe those words will have the same meaning, but maybe additional or alternative meanings will arise because of that conversion.”

That’s not just theory. It’s been born out in recent research from a team at the University of Minnesota, which found that not only are emoji interpreted differently across devices, they’re often confused even within the same platform. In the most extreme example, Microsoft’s “smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes” created a near-even split between people who thought it was negative (44 percent), positive (54 percent), or neutral (the rest). And that’s within the same ecosystem! Introduce cross-pollination, and things get even worse.

“Our results suggest that emoji users would benefit from convergence of emoji design across platforms,” wrote the team. That’s... not going to happen. Unless, of course, that platform is also a messaging service. In other words, unless it’s Facebook Messenger.

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Getting the Messenger

Facebook Messenger’s not the first major messenger app to offer consistent cross-platform emoji; in fact, it’s not the first Facebook app to do so. WhatsApp, also in the Zuck fold, has for some time as well.

The WhatsApp approach differs, though, in that rather than pioneering its own unique emoji set, it simply uses the iOS emoji library, even for Android users. What this also means is that there are gaps between emoji availability, even within WhatsApp itself; Android users had to wait four months to receive the full complement of emoji available on the iOS version of the app.

That’s understandable, as is the reality that most chat and messaging apps simply don’t have the resources to devote to their own emoji set.

“It’s a significant undertaking for every party involved, and it’s a time-consuming design process to create over 1,500 small images that carry a lot of emotional meaning for people,” says Tony Leach, Product Manger for Facebook Messenger. Facebook has both the resources to pull this off, and the motivation: One in 10 sends within the app contain an emoji, a number that Leach is on an upward trajectory, with no sign of slowing. And its 900 million monthly active users bring a wide variety of devices to the table. Or in this case, to the palm.

“Messenger has a distinct advantage because it’s so widely used, and because both the sender and the receiver are using our app,” says Leach. “So, by creating our own emoji set, we can avoid the kinds of cross-platform problems that SMS and other messaging apps have.”

Emoji may not be a literal language (yet, anyway), but it’s at the very least an invaluable form of communication. It’s worth getting right. And internal consistency is an important first step. When my wife and I pass emoji back and forth across the great divide, it’s sometimes as though one of us is speaking Spanish and the other Portuguese. They’re usually similar enough to get by, but there are occasional comprehension gaps. Everyone using Messenger emoji will now be speaking a common tongue.

“Optimally, we’d have just one system of emoji across all platforms and it would be uniform,” says Cohn. Which, again, ain’t happening. “If it stays within an app on all devices, that could be more important because then people will at least tailor their expectations to knowing the emoji for that app. You’d essentially have app-specific ‘accents’ for emoji, and you’d just get used to it.”

Messenger’s emoji also convey meaning more cleanly and clearly than other platforms. Its “smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes” is clearly joyous, not shouting. Ditto its “tears of joy,” which on iOS can look like twin rivers of sorrow. Even the poop emoji feels fresh—though Leach says the first attempt “garnered lots of strong feedback” during early tests.

It’s also a guidebook for how emoji might evolve going forward, at least for the messaging services that can manage it. Having friends (or spouses) with different phones shouldn’t sow confusion and misunderstanding. There’s enough of that already. I don’t care if disappointed but relieved face looks the same everywhere on my phone, but I do want to know if I’m sending my wife a tearful blob (Android) or an anxious sweater (iOS). (Although both describe me pretty well, most of the time).

If that can happen whenever I send a message, no matter were I send it from?

?

Until then, I'll be switching over to Messenger.

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